Violin Read Free

patience to listen. Kind old woman. To whose bedside do you go, that of your daughter in London, giving birth, or that of your dying son?
    The house was littered with the trash.
    Ah, what license I’d taken. The nurses didn’t really want to come during the last days anyway. There are saints around, saints who stay with the dying until the very last, but in this case, I was there, and no saints were needed.
    Every day my old-timers, Althea and Lacomb, had come to knock, but I hadn’t changed the note on the door: All Is Well. Leave a Message.
    And so the place was full of trash, of cookie crumbs and empty cans, and dust and even leaves, as if a window must be open somewhere, probably in the master bedroom which we never used, and the wind had brought the leaves in on the orange carpet.
    I went into the front room. I lay down. I wanted to reach out to touch the button and start the Second Movement again, just Beethoven with me, the captain of this pain. But I couldn’t do it.
    It even seemed all right for the Little Genius, Mozart perhaps, the bright safe glow of angels chattering and laughing and doing back flips in celestial light. I wanted to … But I just didn’t move … for hours. I heard Mozart in my head; I heard his racing violin; always with me it was the violin, the violin above all, that I loved.
    I heard Beethoven now and then; the stronger happiness of his one and only
Violin Concerto
which I had long ago memorized, the easy solo melodies, I mean. But nothing played in the house where I lay with the dead man upstairs. The floor was cold. It was spring and the weather wavered in these days from very hot to winter chill. And I thought to myself, Well, it’s getting cold, and that will keep the body better, won’t it?
    Someone knocked. They went away. The traffic reached its peak. There came a quiet. The phone machine told lie after lie after lie. Click and click and click click.
    Then I slept, perhaps for the first time.
    And the most beautiful dream came to me.

2
    I DREAMED of the sea by the full light of the sun, but such a sea I’d never known. The land was a great cradle in which this sea moved, as the sea at Waikiki or along the coast south of San Francisco. That is, I could see distant arms of land to left and right, reaching out desperately to contain this water.
    But what a fierce and glistening sea it was, and under such a huge and pure sun, though the sun itself I couldn’t see, only the light of it. The great waves came rolling in, curling, full of green light for one instant before they broke and then each wave did a dance—a dance—I’d never witnessed.
    A great frothy foam came from each dying wave, but this foam broke into great random peaks, as many as six to eight for one wave, and these peaks looked like nothing so much as people—people made of the glistening bubbles of the foam—reaching out for the real land, for the beach, for the sun above perhaps.
    Over and over, I watched the sea in my dream. I knewI was watching from a window. And I marveled and tried to count the dancing figures before they would inevitably die away, astonished at how well formed of foam they became, with nodding heads and desperate arms, before they lapsed back as if dealt a mortal blow by the air, to wash away and come again in the curling green wave with a whole new display of graceful imploring movements.
    People of foam, ghosts out of the sea—that’s what they looked like to me, and all along the beach for as far as I could see from my safe window, the waves all did the same; they curled, green and brilliant, and then they broke and became the pleading figures, some nodding to each other, and others away, and then turning back again into a great violent ocean.
    Seas I’ve seen, but never a sea where the waves made dancers. And even as the evening sun went down, an artificial light flooded the combed sand, the dancers came still, with heads high and long spines and arms flung beseechingly